Member-only story
The psychology of ordinary people becoming a movement and rescuing the climate.
As a kid, I thought I couldn’t do much of anything. I was the youngest of four, and as I watched my older siblings go out into the world and do grownup things like getting jobs and dates, I kind of hid in my room. I tried to avoid the world and just exercise my imagination.
I enjoyed that. My ambition was to get a boring job, stay there for 50 years and when I got home, to do creative things — write, draw, invent. Today, in the final quarter of my life, deep in my heart, that’s still what I want.
But something happened along the way. The simple life I sought became unreachable. Despite my diligence and loyalty as a worker, I never landed that steady boring job. Indeed, the world in which those steady boring jobs existed disappeared.
I had no choice but to try something. I was worried. I felt overwhelmed. I didn’t know what I needed to do to make a living, build relationships, to be a part of the world. I was, and remain, an introvert and somewhat of a loner.
Somewhere along the way, I made a few decisions:
- Try to live a lifetime free of regret, and
- Blast through my limits, and reach for what seems impossible
I began doing crazy, daring things — not because I was brave, but because I felt I had no choice.
What did I do? I can’t remember everything, but here’s an example…
In college, I decided I wanted to be a journalist. It was the Watergate era, and nothing seemed more exciting than investigative journalism. But I had been a mediocre student (in my first two years of college, I was pretty lost and didn’t try very hard), and I had done little that showed promise in journalism. I had written concert reviews for the alternative college newspaper, and did the news on the college radio station. That consisted of re-writing teletype reports from UPA and AP and reading them on the air.
So, I asked myself: what COULD I do that would make me a real force in journalism, a somebody? And the answer came: I could break news on the biggest story in the country, the Iran hostage crisis. Or rather, WE could.
